This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2007, held in Paris, France, September 2007. The 19 revised full papers and 12 revised short papers presented together with five invited talks and the abstracts of 32 poster papers are organized in topical sections on rendering and analysis, culture and identity, behavior models, feedback models, dialogues, applications, evaluation, gaze models and emotions.

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are autonomous software entities with human-like appearance and communication skills. These agents can take on a number of different roles, for example, as an assistant, tutor, information provider, or customer service agent. They may also simply represent or entertain a user.

The precise nature and benefits of different characteristics of ECAs requires careful investigation. Questions range from the function of an eyebrow raise to mechanisms for assessing and improving ECA trustworthiness.

This book will help experts and designers in the...